I make use of Buffer to schedule posts that I can plan ahead, like articles coming out and so on. Like so many services these days, Buffer offers an AI to help generate ideas, draft them, improve them, and even write them for you. Is there a space in the writing journey for people to use AI? I would say there might be a very limited space. As in, microscopically miniscule. Possibly.
I did a little experiment a long while ago with Buffer’s AI, and asked it to plan a bunch of posts across two social networks based on a group of topics which I usually post about. What I ended up with was enough posts to make at least a post a day for over a year. That meant I could schedule the posts with minimal correction and not have to really think about social media for a year.
For genuine interaction with your readers, this plan is less than optimal. If we are just here to pump out verbal diarrhoea, then such a scheme would work. But for a unique voice, the human needs to be there in what we post. Absolutely, for meaningful interaction with readers, which makes total sense for indie authors, you need to write, make, and deliver your own content with no AI writing it.
I have encountered an opinion which holds that, as long as the writing is all human, using AI for things like prompts to get that writing started is fine. I have already given my opinions about the post-draft process, so I will not dive into that here. While I think prompt generation might be the one area where using AI might be acceptable to me, I still have some serious questions about.
The first is if AI is developing your prompts, and therefore, your ideas from a massive data set of previous language it has been trained on, how unique can those prompts be? This presents critical creative issues for me as an author. Of course, I have thought of ideas, one of which I thought was a unique and novel world, only to find Drew Wagar’s Emanation series had already used the idea and done so with far more skill than I could have brought to it. Using AI for prompts and ideas plunges us even more into the derivative with, I think, fewer opportunities to take even existing inspiration into new directions. While we will come up with ideas that have been done before, this does not excuse us from trying without turning to AI.
The second question is even more cutting, I think. If, as an author, I need AI to supply me with ideas, should I even be an author? I would lean to the negative on that question. If I cannot pump out ideas that are my own, no matter how dumb they are, I have a very real problem and need to ask some deep questions about my choice of artistic output. I would even go so far as to say I probably should have stuck to drawing stick figures, as they would have been a more genuine expression of my artistic side than AI-generated prompts.
When I started planning Temporary Citizen, I honestly thought it was a really stupid idea. I initially planned it as a single-part short story, but as I got into the writing, I asked the question, “why not run with the idiocy of the story?” What resulted was a fun, light-hearted, horror-esque story which is completely ridiculous.
Temporary Citizen might be ridiculous and stupid, but it is my ridiculousness and stupidity. I would like to think AI would never have come up with anything like it. I am pretty sure AI has never come up with something this original.
Over the months since my last post about AI, I am still convinced my stated position is still fairly correct. AI is not merely a tool. It is a technology that allows us to be creatively lazy through by-passing a number of the steps needed to create a story, long or short, that has a unique and individual voice rooted in human experience and the human spirit.
In short, to ask the question some have put out there, does being pro-AI make you anti-human? In the arts, I think it does. By using AI, we surrender at least part of the artistic process to a machine. The struggle of that process is vital to genuine expression, and it is that struggle as experienced by an embodied, emotional, conscious, and sentient being which makes art so very relatable and relevent. Artistic expression and thought are part of what makes us uniquely human. To short cut this is to make your writing, at best, irrelevant from the very first step of creation.
You can grab my pure-human book, NeoTokyo Dead, from all fantastic platforms!
